Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

hanselman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 182 posts

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#61

Post by marknutter »

gonehome wrote: post #12
skrebbel wrote: post #6

Folks, the big point of this article is not that Hanselman likes C#, it's that his list of options does not include Objective-C or Java. It's that he thinks that the web will win (over app stores). I strongly believe that he's right there. At some point, app stores had "discoverability" as an advantage over the web. This has been one of the strongholds of native app proponents. These days however, with the enormous a…

I don't think it's just discoverability though. I think the main question is if mobile web applications will be able to match native on both quality and performance. Facebook attempted this and failed badly, but that doesn't mean it can't happen or that native will always have an edge. If native does continue to have an edge though then I think web has an uphill battle.

Facebook was just a bit too early when trying to make html5 work on smart phones. If they were to make the attempt again today it would probably successful.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#63

Post by camus2 »

taude wrote: post #47

1) Any high-level language that runs in the Java VM. Because 1) there's tons of open source libraries 2) syntactic sugar for devs 3) operational stability of the VM 4) flexibility of running it on both open source and closed source OSes meeting a variety of business requirements. 2) A scripting language for gluing your operations together, for quick and dirty services, prototyping, etc...: Python 3) JavaScript.

Is there a C# on the JVM ? it would be awesome.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#64

Post by TuringTest »

The Functional Reactive Programming paradigm is going to hit hard. It makes parallel programming extremely easy, which is a huge bonus for multithreading (a great way to harness multiprocessors) and for loading web pages asynchronously.

Libraries for this programming style are being created for almost any popular platform, and knowledge is spreading quickly. I recommend following some tutorial or online course on the subject.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#65

Post by edwinnathaniel »

collyw wrote: post #54
juu4 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> his list of options does not include Objective-C or Java He mentions Java, twice. There is nothing wrong with making web-apps in Java, and there are some nice web frameworks to help doing that.

Depending on the type of web app you are making, there are generally better (more productive) tools for the job than Java.

In general, the productivity gap has dimnished signficantly.

Unless if we are discussing prototype/quick throwaway/very small web app. In that segment, Rails is still the king.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#66

Post by chriswarbo »

collyw wrote: post #57
gizmo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No doubt, knowing C always helps. gdb and strace work where other tools fail. In order to be a well rounded developer you ideally have familiarity with functional programming, declarative programming, lisp, and a much more. You hit diminishing returns pretty quickly though.

With the exception of SQL, are there any mainstream declarative languages?

I hear that HTML is becoming popular these days.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#67

Post by CmonDev »

taude wrote: post #47

1) Any high-level language that runs in the Java VM. Because 1) there's tons of open source libraries 2) syntactic sugar for devs 3) operational stability of the VM 4) flexibility of running it on both open source and closed source OSes meeting a variety of business requirements. 2) A scripting language for gluing your operations together, for quick and dirty services, prototyping, etc...: Python 3) JavaScript.

Or you could just pick a language with the best IDE support. Which leaves us with Java and C#.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#68

Post by UK-AL »

spamizbad wrote: post #5

Ultimately these things are a matter of opinion, but as a developer who knows C#, I'm not sure I'd bother to learn it again if I had to completely reboot my knowledge. I can understand the perspective of being pragmatic with regards to the job market, but while there are an abundance of C# jobs available, offers tend to be lower unless you're specialized in Sharepoint or very senior. Culture can be a challenge in tho…

In the valley, python & ruby will probably have higher salaries.

Outside probably Java and C#.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#69

Post by CmonDev »

rip747 wrote: post #44

I've been doing ColdFusion for well over 13 years now. The reason I choose it was because at the time the only other web technology that looked promising was ASP and I _hate_ Visual Basic with a passion. Today I'm focusing all my attention on C# and Ruby. That all said, if I had to start over today... I wouldn't be programming, I go back to networking. As much as I love programming, it just doesn't amaze me anymore.…

Pick a job that will not get automated in 10 years.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#70

Post by bad_user »

forgottenpaswrd wrote: post #56
skrebbel wrote: post #6

Folks, the big point of this article is not that Hanselman likes C#, it's that his list of options does not include Objective-C or Java. It's that he thinks that the web will win (over app stores). I strongly believe that he's right there. At some point, app stores had "discoverability" as an advantage over the web. This has been one of the strongholds of native app proponents. These days however, with the enormous a…

"It's that he thinks that the web will win (over app stores). I strongly believe that he's right there." "Whoever can make the Google of app discovery might make a temporary splash, but i bet that, not long after, people will return to plain old Google Search." You remember me to Kodak's "people will return to make analog photos, people want to hold something in their hand". You are deluding yourself, and you can't s…

> "In the browser is like 500 if we were to do things on javascript."

That's more like 1.5x:

http://asmjs.org/

http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/12/gap-between-asm-js-and-nat...

> "Android is not web for a reason. It sucks for lots of things. It is not that Google has not tried, as it is in their best interest to do so."

Google hasn't tried deep integration of web apps with Android. Their competing Chrome OS does and Chromebooks are a bestseller in 2013. Mobile Chrome doesn't have "apps" or plugins, like Firefox does, which is kind of disappointing. "Add to Homescreen" of favorite links was added in version 31 and current stable version is 32, so that's one version ago.

The reasons for this state of affairs can only be guessed, but given that you probably don't work for Google and you don't claim to have insider knowledge, I guess that quoted phrase is just pure speculation - and a much more sensible guess would be that delivering a native SDK that works well was faster than trying to push for new web standards (since Android was competing with iOS and second to market) ... something which they are doing with Chrome OS and Mozilla is doing with Firefox OS and it's a very different reason than your claim.

And if I am to make a prediction, I bet that in the future either we'll see Android and Chrome OS merging, or we'll see Chrome OS mobile devices, in addition to Android.

> "Consumers probably don't like having to be connected all day, all what they do in their computers being monitored in real time and stored forever by the NSA."

Web interfaces and offline access are not mutually exclusive. Chrome's offline GMail is pretty good these days. For PGP encryption in GMail's interface, I've been using: http://www.mailvelope.com/

Surely Chrome's permissions for extensions could be improved for better security, because as we've seen, perfectly legitimate extensions can turn over night to mallware/spyware/adware. And we would need new web standards for extensions and probably for doing client-side encryption, however these are not insurmountable problems. Either way, if you're using GMail, your unencrypted emails will get stored on their servers, whether you're using GMail's web interface or not.

> If you have a company outside the USA you will have no brain if you used web for your secret sauce. They will take it from you, they will give it to an American company and even patent it. With native it is orders of magnitude harder to do this.

I don't like the insult inherent in this message. I'm using web GMail and I'm not an US citizen. The problem is that Google is an US company, not that GMail is a web interface.

And in regards to clients and native apps - my trust for binary blobs is equal to my trust for web interfaces, which is zero. Basically I don't trust anything that's not open-source and developed in the open - as in, are you sure your operating system doesn't have backdoors planted? ... just saying, seeing that you're playing the trust card.

Post reply on HN